As he rode through the streets of Sherwood toward the border he observed the depth of the changes. There were no burnt automobiles or piles of garbage in the streets. Children played in their yards. At one corner ten people with paintbrushes painted a giant mandala, one of the beautification projects. But most of all there was a changed feeling in the air. A month was a long time.
Jamal received word that his father wanted to see him. He wound his way through the big house to Gregor’s office and stood outside of the door for a moment in the busy hallway.
“He’s in,” a Ranger said as he passed.
“Thanks,” Jamal said and still did not enter. Being called into the office was rare, and there were only a few reasons for it. Jamal knocked once and then entered.
Gregor sat behind an oak desk that had come with the house. He gripped his tobacco pipe in one hand, though he’d given up smoking cigarettes a decade earlier after heart surgery, and tobacco was difficult to find anymore. He liked having the pipe in his hand. The curvy bowl of it fit the circumference of his forefinger and thumb perfectly and he enjoyed having an object to point directions with, as if the pipe itself held some share in commanding the armed and unarmed forces of the government of Sherwood. Conductors had their batons, cowboys their pistols, professors their pencils, and so he felt justified in taking up a rod of some sort with which to execute his business.
“Sit,” Gregor said, and with his pipe end pointed to the chair in front of the desk.
Jamal’s relationship with his father was complicated, but his wholly separate—in his mind—relationship with the same man, as his general, was not. There were two separate tracks this conversation could ride on. One train was simple, direct, its compartments clean and uncluttered by familial ties and a mutual relationship with his mother. In the other train, each car held a different chaotic story, in which no clear understanding of the train as a whole could be gleaned. In that train his mother and older brother entertained court, aunts and uncles barbecued or fought, and in each played out a scene from the last thirty years that was on permanent archive in his mind.
In one, he is walking through the living room, bearing a small bag of groceries his mother tasked him with carrying. There is a white woman lying facedown on the floor, her small skirt hiked up to her waist and nothing else on. She is asleep or unconscious or dead, and Jamal stares at her, wondering if perhaps she was a neighbor who had accidentally gone home to the wrong house. Or was this something white people do? She was pretty, but her mouth was open and the drool at the corner of her lip was unsettling. Mom? He called but she was still out at the car. Dad? There was a sound from the bathroom and in there he found his father, naked and in the tub. In the toilet there was the rank sloppy jumble of something thrown up. Dad? He said again. He remembered his father opening one eye falteringly, and then his eyes rolled back into his head and Jamal screamed.
There was a whole era of drug addiction and infidelity to contend with, until his mother’s death straightened his father out.
In another car he walks through as a grown man, serving tea to his father and his father’s enemy, a man named Barstow, as they finally agree not to fight any more. In this, he is angry at his father for not reaching out and snapping the man’s neck, the man who by proxy has been his own enemy for seven years, since his exit from adolescence. The man who had taken his brother’s life. Barstow was a wiry snake of a man, his hair in cornrows, his teeth full of gold. After surgeons had opened up his own heart, Gregor had had a change of heart about war, even as he’d won. He brought Barstow in for a truce, for peace in the neighborhood. Gregor’s presence—and that’s what Jamal remembers most, the presence of a man who could straighten out the most curved of wicked sticks—made his enemy trust him. In Gregor’s presence, a man became different, better. You wanted to please Gregor. And you did not want to be his enemy.
Gregor tapped the bowl of his pipe on his desk, making a solid knocking sound. “Three Rangers have disappeared,” he said. “You know anything about that?”
Jamal scooted in his chair, understanding which Gregor he was talking to, and feeling a nervousness over his charge. “When, from where?” Jamal said.
“All three were working in the Woodlawn neighborhood. Two street watchers and one border patrol.”
“What do we know?”
Gregor waved his pipe in a dissatisfied, dismissive gesture. “They’re poorly trained. Who knows, they could have gotten lost. They didn’t come back yesterday and didn’t show up this morning.”
Jamal waited for instruction with uneasiness. They, his father and he, had a history with Woodlawn.
“They could be sleeping something off.” Gregor glanced then at Jamal, eyeing him over the top of his reading glasses, and Jamal saw the subtle concession, knew that they’d just seen through the train’s window a vision of that other chaotic engine running up the mountainside, as if to say, “some day we’ll ride that one.”
“I need you to go find them. If we’re having defections, I need to know immediately. If someone is disappearing us, we need to know even sooner.”
“Yes, sir,” Jamal stood up.
“Take two of your own with you.” Gregor tapped his pipe on the desk and Jamal reached for the door, musing that he could never tell his general his pipe habit looked ridiculous.
“And Jamal? Don’t go falling under some fantastic notion that this is happyland, OK? Everybody else here has gone all dizzy off their own self-satisfied euphoria. They are grudges out there. We’re recent from violence. The reflex runs deep.”
Jamal went to the map room to pull the last week’s notes on Woodlawn before he went to investigate.
When he entered there was a squabble going on between Bea and another woman about, as far as he could tell, handwriting legibility.
“Everybody,” Jamal said in greeting and was roundly ignored. The map room was a place of wonder for him, but as far as he could tell it made everyone batty who worked there, down to the last man. Zach was a nice enough guy, but sometimes he felt like he’d have better luck talking to a bear, were there any bears left and were one inclined to speak on national security issues. The man’s brain was turned inside out.
He asked where Zach was.
A quiet spread over the room.
Jamal approached Leroy but the man moved away as if there were a pole attached to each of them, and Jamal’s forward motion pushed him an equal distance away. “Leroy?” Jamal said, one finger up in the air, but Leroy turned away again, as if he’d not spoken at all. Jamal stood awkwardly under the Woodlawn map and wondered if the map room had taken an extra dose of crazy.
Bea continued to reprimand the Ranger, and Jamal waited his turn.
“—but nobody uses the symbols. They don’t make any sense to me.”
“Don’t make sense to you. Exactly! I don’t care if they make sense to you, just fucking use them. Can I help you Jamal?” Bea said, sounding like a diner waitress on the 3 a.m. shift.
“Hey Bea—yeah—is Zach around?”
“Zach is gone.”
“Like disappeared?” Jamal said and a sudden shiver of fear went up his legs.
“No no no, gone. He left, went home, quit.”
Jamal noticed for the first time the changed demeanor of the room. The massive box of unprocessed notes, the chaotic work table, the floor covered in a coat of discarded data. “These?” he pointed at Zach’s dashboard of resource indicators, which he took much comfort in.
“Hey now, listen. You wouldn’t believe how busy—”
“Not accusing!” Jamal said. “Trying to scope the situation here is all. And Maid Marian?”
“She’s in her office, business as usual.”
“But you’re not giving her reports?”
“Leroy and I are doing the motherfucking best we can here, Jamal.”
“I’m not on your case, Bea. My father know about this?”
“He knows.”
“I didn’t realize it was so—�
��
“It’s complex, trust me.”
There was a sound at the door and a Ranger dropped off a stack of notes in the incoming box. “Woodlawn,” he said.
“Ah! I’ll take a look at those,” Jamal said, very happy to have some direction other than the conversation he was having with Bea. He knew Bea well enough from practice with the Going Street Brigade a couple of times a week. She did firearms practice, obstacle course, running, fighting. She was driven and hardcore and would make an excellent soldier, though she ran a little hot. He’d thought of her as uncomplaining, if a little hostile, until now.
He retrieved several disordered stacks of notes from the Woodlawn section and made his way to the couch.
There were about eighteen hundred houses in Woodlawn, twelve hundred of them occupied, and to him it seemed as though they’d received notes from about a third of them. He flipped through, trying to make sense of the handwriting and somewhat cryptic nature of the notes.
6241 14th—O.H. collapsed middle of night, needs repair
“What’s O.H.?”
“Outhouse,” Bea said.
6255 14th—Wants to knw when school will open
6311 14th—has 5 gal gas 2 donate. He will talk ear off.
6322 14th—Thinks she has poison oak..??
6331 14th—Complains man in 6311 left garbage in his yrd.
“This is ridiculous. Why are we getting so much information?” Jamal said. “Do we take care of this crap?”
“Renee wants everybody to feel heard.”
Jamal had a better sense of how the job might make you feel like that 3 a.m. diner waitress. He flipped through each one until he found a note that said, “Wants me to tell M.M. Charles is in charge now—? Was insistent.”
Jamal thumbed the edge of the note and reread it. 6722 12th. Close to the park, which had always had a dark edge to it. Charles in charge. Did he know any Charleses? He slipped the note in his pocket and put the rest back in incoming under the hot glare of Bea.
“Is he coming back?” he said.
Bea put up a hand. “Fuck if I know.”
Jamal took a step out the door. “Weren’t he and Maid Marian?”
Bea frowned and shook her head no and then appeared to change her mind and nod yes.
Jamal and two of the Going Street Brigade rode down the once tree-lined Ainsworth Street toward Woodlawn neighborhood. They carried handguns only, tucked away inconspicuously. Jamal didn’t want them spotted carrying rifles. They wore no uniforms. They were just three men on bikes.
He’d chosen the two men based on their competence, though he knew they didn’t find terribly much to like in each other, though at one time they must have appraised each other’s skills and come to correct assumptions. You really didn’t know a man’s true skills until he was out and under fire, Jamal thought. Rick was a white guy, an Iraq veteran. He was gung-ho and fleshy—beefy—in that US soldier way, though reduced water and food intake had certainly pared him down some. He felt decidedly American to Jamal, with a corny sense of humor, oafish veneer, and a firm sense of what he believed to be right and wrong. He was quick to deduce a situation and, when a situation turned serious, he became someone else entirely, subtle and professional.
The other man, Carl, was a defected police officer. He was in his forties and hypercompetitive, a not entirely stable man, given to holding silent grudges or making unwarranted hostile remarks, but over time Jamal had found him one of the most competent of the brigade, who, because he’d been born and raised there, had a deep understanding of the issues of the neighborhood.
As they rode they passed the work of the territory. A crowd of people were gathered at the grocery store on 33rd and Killingsworth, repairing the windows and cleaning the place up—quite inefficiently, from the looks of it. As with any project there were probably four times the needed number of workers. Maid Marian wanted people busy, he knew. She wanted them all to feel wanted and useful and to have a stake in things, even if it meant a mob showed up to build an outhouse. The dead trees that lined Ainsworth Street were being cut down to provide firewood for the winter ahead. Jamal spotted water carriers and the occasional Ranger.
Woodlawn neighborhood was quiet as they weaved their way through its blocks, looking for a place to start. They spotted a water carrier team, and Jamal pulled them over. He wondered about two white girls in this, of all neighborhoods, mostly black and with its history of violence. Or perhaps this was only his history. He told them they were Rangers, and saw that they recognized him.
He saw their own Ranger come into view at the end of the block and start walking toward them—water carriers were supposed to be under line-of-sight protection at all times. “We’re out of uniform,” Jamal said.
“Obviously,” one of them said. She was tall and thin, like a length of board. “Have you got the password?”
As a security precaution, there was a daily password haiku displayed at Sherwood headquarters. Rangers were required to speak this to each other. If you had not been through HQ on that day, you had no authority. It was not a tremendous security measure, but it gave a sense of formality and dignity to interactions and reminded them all to be vigilant.
Jamal leaned in close to the thin girl and whispered that day’s pass-phrase haiku into her ear: “There is only one, for which all life does depend, the sun is a fire.”
The closeness made him desire to lean in further and kiss her neck. And he saw a similar reaction in her, namely: in a whispered pass-phrase something sexy, but mostly weird, had happened deep in the territory of each other’s personal space. Perhaps he should have said it aloud, he thought.
She signaled an “OK” up the street to her Ranger.
Jamal asked her about the route and if she’d felt or seen anything unusual.
“Everything is fine,” she said, “unless you say it’s not.”
Jamal showed her three photos, each with a label bearing a name, and asked if she’d known them. They’d already been to each of the Rangers’ residences to make sure that no inebriation was being slept off, and it was there they’d obtained a photo of each, but the three—all black men in their twenties—were unaccounted for. One of them had a family and two children and the wife was justifiably worried.
“I know all three,” the first girl said. “They’re Woodlawn Rangers. This one”—she tapped a picture of a wide-smiling boy, barely twenty—“he’s our Ranger sometimes: Robby. What’s up?”
Jamal shrugged. “We’re looking for them—you seen them recently?”
“Sure, last day or two.”
“Which is it, one day or two?”
She shrugged. “We don’t always see them up close.” She turned to her partner.
“Two days,” the second girl said. “I noticed the shift changed up. Some of the other water carriers have new Rangers. And that Ranger”—she waved in the direction of their ranger, a block away—“isn’t our normal.”
“And there’s been no rumors or talk?”
“I assumed HQ switched things up. We don’t talk to them much on the job.”
The first girl pointed to the photo of the man who was a father. “I talk to him sometimes,” she said. “We talk about kids. He cycles back with me sometimes. We live near each other.”
“And the last place you saw him?”
“Crossing Woodlawn Park, probably.”
Jamal swore. That goddamn park would be the end of him. “Thanks,” he said, “we’ll nose around there.” He smiled at the first girl whose ear he’d recently whispered a haiku into, and she smiled back. “We’ll catch you around then,” he said. For him, as of yet, the Sherwood revolution had been an utter failure on the sexual front. Rumor was, everyone else was fucking like rabbits. He’d noticed all sorts of sly, lingering looks and unintelligible jokes passing back and forth in his Going Street Brigade, where he spent the majority of his time, but as captain he was kept in the dark.
On 12th near Woodlawn Park the streets were silent. They got o
ff their bikes and walked and Jamal felt spooked. There was something not quite right but he couldn’t place what. He had memories of trick-or-treating in this neighborhood, and later of the war he’d fought up here with his father’s people against Barstow. The memories unnerved him. Maybe no one lived in these houses. He studied them and they looked like others everywhere—dead trees, a coating of dust and grime covering them. There were many broken windows; the riots had been intense here.
“Quiet,” he said.
They stopped and Jamal dug out his canteen and passed it around. They each took a swallow. He opened a US government rations nut bar and divvied it in thirds and passed it around.
They stood with their bikes under the wiry skeleton of what was once a great tree, the kind which he could no longer identify.
Jamal remembered the water carrier notes and he pulled out the note that read Charles is in charge here now. The house was at the end of the block, up on a rise, with a commercial shop butting up against it.
In charge of what, he wondered. The house? The block? The neighborhood? He looked around for Rangers or water carriers or citizens and saw none. It struck him as unsettling. Jamal pulled out his phone but there was no signal. It was an old habit from another time, though he still kept it charged, when he could. The time read 1:19.
Sherwood Nation Page 30
